Dead Mans Hand

11:00 A.M.

Digger's apartment was a fifth floor walk-up on Horatio in the West Village. In the playground across the street, some teenagers were shooting baskets, shirts against skins. Jay stopped to watch for a few minutes. They had a couple girls playing, but they were both on the shirts side, more's the pity.

A heavyset man with a shaved head sat on the stoop of Digger's building, drinking a can of Rheingold. When Jay stepped off the sidewalk, he got up and blocked the door. "You got business here?"

The man had three inches and fifty pounds on him, not' to mention an eagle tattooed on his right biceps and a gold hoop in one ear. "I'm looking for Digger Downs," Jay told him.

"He ain't home."

"I'll check for myself, thanks."

"The fuck you will. We had enough freaks comin' round for a free look."

Jay didn't like the sound of that. "You had trouble here?" The man crushed the beer can in his fist. "Nothin' like the trouble you're gonna have."

He mulled over the idea of popping this asshole down inside an abandoned subway station, but decided to try it the easy way first. "I want to know what happened here," he said. He took a fold of bills out of his pocket. "So does Mr. Jackson."

"I don't know no Mr. Jackson," the man said, "but you lay a tenspot on me, you can go inside and look."

Wit was a lost art, Jay decided; on the other hand, he'd just saved ten bucks, so he shouldn't complain. He unfolded a ten-dollar bill and put it in the man's thick, callused hand.

"C'mon," the man said, "I ain't got all day." They went inside. The entryway was small and dark, doorbells mounted beside the mailboxes. While the big man fumbled for a key, Jay found Downs and pressed his button. There was no answer.

"You really lookin' for Digger?" his host said, grunting again, as he opened the inner security door. "Like I told you, he ain't here." They stepped through the door, and he pointed up the staircase. "You want to see the bloodstains, they're up on four and five. I been humping up and down all day, I'm sick of all them fucking steps."

"Are you going to tell me what happened here, or should we play twenty questions?"

"Fuck, I thought the whole city knew, the way the cops were crawling all over the place yesterday. You oughta read the Post, mister. Double murder."

"Oh, shit," Jay said, a sinking feeling in the bottom of his stomach. This iced the cake, he supposed, but the frosting was a real ugly flavor. "Downs?"

"Nah. It was Mrs. Rosenstein, she's got the apartment across the hall from Digger, and Jonesy the super."

"Let me guess," Jay said. "They were beaten to death."

"Fuck no."

It had been a long time since Jay Ackroyd had been that surprised. "No?" he said.

"Nah. They was cut to pieces, both of 'em, by some nutcase with a buzz saw. I was the one that found 'em. God, you should've seen it. I took off early yesterday, had this sum bitch of a hangover, and when I come home, there's this shit lying right in front of my door. I'm up on three. Fuck, I almost stepped in it. It was all bloody, like something you'd find in the garbage behind a butcher shop, some piece of meat nobody wanted, y'know? So I nudge it with my foot, and I seen it had an eye in it. Know what it was?" He leaned forward, and Jay could smell the beer on his breath. "Jonesy's face! Not the whole thing, only half of it. It must of fallen down the stairwell. The rest of him was on the fourth-floor landing. I don't know how he made it that far, his whole fucking belly was cut open, and his guts was spilling out on that fag Cooper's welcome mat. His hands was all slimy from trying to stuff 'em back in, but one of them whatchacallits, intensines, it went all the way up the stairs to the fifth floor. That was where I found Mrs. Rosenstein. Betcha never knew them intensines was so long, right?" He shrugged. "Well, the cops took the bodies away, but there's still blood all over the goddamn walls. Now that fuckin' landlord is gonna have to hang some new wallpaper. Bet it takes him six months, though."

"What about Downs?" Jay demanded.

"Fuck if I know. He ain't been home. The cops checked his door, but it was still locked. He's just off doing some write-up for that fuckin' magazine. He's gonna be pissed when he finds out what he missed. What a laugh."

"A riot," said Jay, who didn't think Digger would be pissed at all. "Hey, you ever been in Newark city jail?"

"Fuck no," the man said, with a frown.

"Oh, good," Jay said. "I spent a night there once. It really sucks." He pointed. Air rushed into suddenly empty space with a pop that sounded almost like a hiccup, and Jay was alone in the hallway. He started up the stairs, smiling. That was pointless and petty, and if he kept doing stuff like that he was going to get himself sued one of these days. But sometimes it just felt so good.

He spotted red-brown traces on the third-floor landing, and droplets on the wooden banister between three and four, but the serious bloodstains began on the fourth floor. The faded wallpaper showed long dark streaks in two places, where the custodian must have staggered against the wall as he tried to flee, maimed and bleeding, holding himself together with his hands.

That was pretty bad, but the fifth-floor landing was a lot worse. There were dried brown smears where a body, or a piece of a body, had struck the wall. The carpet runner had soaked up so much blood it looked black in places. The spray had gone everywhere. The walls were spotted by it, as if the hallway had come down with measles. Over his head was a trapdoor to the roof, and even that had caught a few stray droplets.

Jay looked around and tried to reconcile what he was seeing with what he'd seen yesterday morning in the Crystal Palace. It didn't add up. A buzz saw, the asshole downstairs had said; it sure as hell looked like it. The West Village Chainsaw Massacre; no wonder the Post had had a field day. By comparison, Chrysalis had hardly bled at all. A few drops on her blouse, a little down low on the walls, but nothing like this.

He tried on the theory that was all coincidence, that this little exercise in atrocity had nothing to do with what had happened to Chrysalis, but every gut instinct he had told him that was bullshit. What the hell was going on here? Disgusted, Jay turned to Digger's door. It was locked, as advertised. He opened the spring lock easily enough with a credit card, but there was a dead bolt as well. For that he needed a lock pick and a good ten minutes of work. Jay had deft, practiced hands and a real nice set of lock picks, but this was a good lock. Finally he heard the tumblers click, and the door pushed open. There was a chain, he saw as he stepped through, but it hadn't been used. Neither had the police bar, which meant the apartment had been locked from the outside. Jay took one look around and said, "Oh shit."

The place had been trashed. Thoroughly and savagely trashed.

He moved through the cramped little rooms carefully. Things had been thrown, smashed, stepped on. At every turn he expected to find a body, or what remained of a body. The living-room floor was buried in a blizzard of paper. A gigantic old Zenith console television had been reduced to ground glass and kindling, and what might have been an impressive collection of old LPs crunched underfoot as Jay stepped on the pieces. In the bedroom, the bed was in pieces, sheets razored, stuffing torn out of the mattress and scattered, books sliced in half right down their spines. The kitchen was covered with decaying junk food, the riper bits already crawling with roaches. All the cupboards had been shattered, their contents strewn wildly about. A huge old refrigerator lay facedown on the linoleum. When Jay bent to examine it, he found a jagged gash in the thick metal of the door. "Jesus Christ," he said. He stood up.

Back in the living room, he noticed the bars on the window. He went through the apartment once again to check. There were thick iron bars on every window, even in the white porcelain ruins of the bathroom. The bars looked new. Installed within the past year, Jay would be willing to bet. It looked as though Digger had been as security conscious as Chrysalis, not that it had done him much good. The windows were all locked. Whoever had done this had come in the same way Jay had, through the front door.

Unless maybe they'd come in through a wall.

Jay looked around for an ace of spades, not really expecting to find one. Yeoman might be a psychopath, but his killings had always been accomplished with a certain cool, professional efficiency. This, and the butchery out in the hall, looked like the work of some rabid animal. Jay could easily imagine the killer foaming at the mouth as he went from room to room, destroying.

He was making one final, methodical sweep through the apartment when he spotted the notebooks on the bedroom floor, jumbled up with the latest celebrity bios, a few reference books, and a wide selection of paperbacks by Anonymous with soft-focus covers of women in Victorian undergarments. Not more than one book in five was intact. The corner of one wire-bound notebook was sticking out from under a snowdrift of loose pages, and the plain cardboard cover caught his eye. He dug through the paper and found three more of them, and parts of a fourth. Reporter's notebooks, filled with a hurried, semilegible scrawl. A long diagonal chunk was missing from one book, but you could still read most of it.

Each notebook was dated. Jay sat gingerly on what remained of Digger's mattress and opened the most recent. The last article Digger had worked up was called "The Farmer of Park Avenue," about an eight-year-old girl whose miniature farm filled an entire floor in her daddy's Park Avenue town home. The farm had model houses, painted rivers, felt grass, toy cars and trucks, and an electric train that circled the property. Her farm animals were real. Cows four inches long, tiny little sheepdogs, suckling pigs the size of cockroaches, all shrunken to their present diminutive size by the freckle-faced little farmer, who just loved animals.

Somehow Jay didn't think eight-year-old Jessica von der Stadt was a likely suspect. He flipped back to older material, looking for any mention of Chrysalis, death threats, or homicidal maniacs with or without buzz saws. He found the address of a photographer who had gotten some spicy shots of Peregrine breast-feeding, bios of the government aces assigned to protect the presidential candidates, Hiram's recipe for chocolate mango pie, quotes for a cover profile of Mister Magnet, and Mistral's fond reminiscences of the day her daddy had taught her to fly.

Jay flipped the notebook aside in disgust, and found himself possessed of an overpowering urge to get the hell out of this place.

Brennan sat in a booth in Hairy's Kitchen, sipping occasionally from his cup of tea and ignoring the irritated stares from the passing waitress when he refused to order anything else. He was surrounded by a litter of newspapers that he'd read looking for news about the killing. Chrysalis's death was already relegated to the back pages, pushed aside by the political craziness in Atlanta where a huge platform fight on the jokers' rights plank was brewing. Barnett was marshaling his holier-than-thou forces and the big clash between him and Hartmann was looming on the near horizon.

Chrysalis's death was already old news. Only the Jokertown Cry was still running the killing as a front-page item, including a photo of the detective team heading the investigation, jokertown's own Harvey Kant, and his partner, Thomas Jan Maseryk.

Brennan put his teacup down, oblivious to another hard stare from the waitress, and looked closely at the grainy newspaper photo of two men standing outside the Crystal Palace. Kant was the joker on the left. A tall, scaly reptiloid, he reminded Brennan of his old Shadow Fist foe, Wyrm. The other was Maseryk. Brennan nodded to himself. He slid out of the booth, went to the public phone booth in the back of the restaurant, and dialed the Jokertown precinct. It took a moment for the connection to go through, and then he heard a deep, gruff, tired voice on the other end. "Maseryk."

It was definitely him. Brennan hadn't heard the voice in almost fifteen years, but he still recognized it. There was a shadow in it, a brooding, sepulchral tone that hinted at the blackness that had followed Maseryk everywhere when Brennan had known him in Nam.

"Long time no see," Brennan said quietly.

There was a short silence. Brennan could almost hear the gears whirring in Maseryk's head. "Who is this?"

"Brennan. Daniel Brennan."

"Brennan?"

"It's me."

"Christ. I guess it's been a long time. So is this a social call to renew old acquaintances?"

"Of a type," Brennan said. "I'd like to talk to you."

"About what, after all these years?"

"About Chrysalis's murder."

"What's your interest in that?"

"Personal. She was a friend of mine."

"Mmm. You always did take things personal. Okay. Where shall we have this chat?"

Brennan thought it over. He wanted to pump Maseryk for information, but Maseryk was always a closemouthed sort. It wouldn't hurt to meet in a place that might smooth Maseryk's often-touchy feelings, a place Maseryk would also be disinclined to bust up if their talk went sour. "How about over lunch at Aces High?"

"That's a little rich for a cop's pay."

"My treat."

"How can I resist?"